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I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
I think that anything Hanania writes ought to be taken with an entire sack of salt. When I first encountered him I thought he was a parody account along the same lines of Titania McGrath, but now I think he's something more along the Moldbug. IE an edgy left-wing activist type who started out as a tankie only to realize that there was nothing "edgy" about being a tankie in places like Berkley or the University of Chicago.
Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The impression that this really only crystalized in 2016 is presumably a product of being too you to remember the 90s and Clinton's efforts to quash talk radio and the nascent internet coupled with revionionist histories by left leaning journalists. For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s or trying to get D&D and violent video games banned in the 80s and 90s, it was people like Fredric Wertham, and Tipper Gore.
I am old enough to remember the 80s and 90s, and your history is inaccurate. Sure, Fredric Wertham and Tipper Gore were flagbearers, there have always been liberal activists crying "Think of the children!" But I also remember the Moral Majority. I also remember who was railing against D&D: it wasn't liberals, it was conservative Christians. Same with rock and rap, Tipper Gore and Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment notwithstanding. (Liberals complained about "violence" but that's about it.) Clinton complained a lot about right-wing talk radio and disinformation, but he didn't quash anything.
Authoritarians are very pro-censorship, and authoritarianism is not really a left/right phenomenon. Hardly a novel observation. But in the U.S., historically it's more often been the right pulling the censorship levers. That's reversed today, but I think you are the one looking at things with a revisionist lens.
The Christian right might have been trying, but they accomplished nothing. Even at the time. It wasn't just a long term loss, they lost all the short term battles as well. The major media outlets all ignored them and kept pushing left wing ideas the entire time.
That's not true: TV shows, comic books, radio stations, and yes, schools and universities, all were pressured by right-wingers and often censured teachers and classes, took programs off the air or refused to play certain episodes or songs because of (largely) conservative Christian complaints. "D&D panic" was definitely a thing, with some schools outright forbidding D&D books on campus. It's true there were few outright "bannings," but then, there are few outright bannings today. What is materially different today is social media, where it's much more visible when the people running the companies are kicking famous individuals off their platforms.
During that whole period I could walk into a bookstore and see all the D&D books lined up, ready to be bought. Show me the bookstore selling "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street"
Do you think this is the first time in American history that a publisher discontinued publishing titles or stores and libraries stopped shelving them because of political or social pressure?
I am not asserting a one to one equivalency between today and the 1980s, I am asserting that the claim that the right wing never "successfully" censored anything is false.
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I'm not sure why you are implying that "not conservative republicans" = progressives, since the most conservative politicians in that period were southern Democrats (there were, of course, essentially no elected Republicans from the deep South in that period; see here, here, here and here )
As for the Comics Code, it grew out of the 1954 investigation by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee members during the hearing were : Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey),Estes Kefauver (D- Tennessee), Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. (D-Missouri), and William Langer (R-North Dakota). By the time the linked report was issued, Olin D. Johnston (D- South Carolina) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) were on the committee, but they did not participate in preparing the report.
Anyhow, the idea that moral censoriousness around images of sex and violence is the sole province of progressives, rather than conservatives, is very odd: Moral objections to that sort of material is pretty much a part of the definition of being "conservative" in the USA, and certainly when you look at efforts to remove books from schools and libraries, the pattern is clearly that liberals object to books that are ostensibly racist, and conservatives object to books that depict sex, nudity, or violence. And, of late book challenges are most common for the latter reasons.
One, you're conflating moral objections with legislative action.
Two, I didn't say it was the sole province of progressives, I was pointing out that support for censorship has always been a component of the progressive platform and the narrative being repeated by the OP and others in this thread that progressive democrats have always opposed censorship and conservative republicans always supported it only for the positions to flip in response to Trump is either deeply ignorant, or dishonest revisionism.
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I wonder at the extent to which this is true. I remember William Bennett and Joe Liebermann handing out "silver sewer" awards to "cultural polluters". I likewise seem to remember support for obscenity laws and public decency standards among the Red Tribers of my youth. I don't remember a lot of legislative action, but I do seem to recall a fair amount of cultural pressure.
What's the model, here? Did Red Tribe never care about corrupting content or public indecency? Did they merely never care about it from a legislative angle? This seems like a thesis worthy of a deeper dive.
It's not that the republicans never "cared about corrupting content or public indecency", it's that legislative action seeking to silence it against it has always a been a distinctly progressive (think blue-tribe "Karen" archetype) phenomenon.
Remember that William Bennet was a Democrat when Reagan hired him and that your other central figures, Joe Liebermann, Tipper Gore, and Brian Williams, were not exactly "Red" by any stretch of the imagination.
Joe Lieberman explicitly profiled himself as a moderate Democrat, not a progressive, though, going as far as to endorse McCain in 2008. My understanding is that so did Al Gore in 80s. PMRC had four founders - "The women who founded the PMRC are Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius", says Wikipedia - and apart from Tipper, others were wives of Republican politicians or activists.
As I said to another user, I think this says a lot more about how far "the center" has moved to the left than it does anything else]
I don't follow. My points, to spell them out, were:
Saying that "Joe Lieberman (...) was not exactly "Red" by any stretch of imagination" is incorrect; you could do it with some stretch of imagination, particularly around 2008
PMRC wasn't simply some Democratic effort, as some posts in this thread portray it; apart from Tipper, there were numerous (presumably) Republican women involved.
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